Chapter 3. Installation System

The Debian Installer is the official installation system for Debian. It offers
a variety of installation methods. Which methods are available to install your
system depends on your architecture.

Images of the installer for jessie can be found together with
the Installation Guide on the Debian
website.

The Installation Guide is also included on the first CD/DVD of the official
Debian CD/DVD sets, at:

/doc/install/manual/language/index.html

You may also want to check
the errata for
debian-installer for a list of known issues.

3.1. What's new in the installation system?

There has been a lot of development on the Debian Installer since its previous
official release with Debian 7,
resulting in both improved hardware support and
some exciting new features.

In these Release Notes we'll only list the major changes in the
installer. If you are interested in an overview of the detailed
changes since wheezy, please check the release announcements
for the jessie beta and RC releases available from the Debian
Installer's news history.

3.1.1. Major changes

Removed ports

Support for the 'ia64' and 'sparc' architectures has been dropped from the installer since
they have been removed from the archive.

New ports

Support for the 'arm64' and 'ppc64el' architectures has been added to the installer.

New default init system

The installation system now installs systemd as the default init system.

Desktop selection

The desktop can now be chosen within tasksel during installation. Note that
several desktops can be selected at the same time, but some combinations of
desktops may not be co-installable.

Replacing "--" by "---" for boot parameters

Due to a change on the Linux kernel side, the "---" separator is now used instead
of the historical "--" to separate kernel parameters from userland parameters.

New languages

Thanks to the huge efforts of translators, Debian can now be installed in 75
languages, including English. This is one more language than in wheezy.
Most languages are available in both the text-based installation
user interface and the graphical user interface, while some
are only available in the graphical user interface.

Languages added in this release:

Tajik has been added to the graphical and text-based installer.

The languages that can only be selected using the graphical installer as their
character sets cannot be presented in a non-graphical environment are: Amharic,
Bengali, Dzongkha, Gujarati, Hindi, Georgian, Kannada, Khmer, Malayalam,
Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan and Uyghur.

UEFI boot

The Jessie installer improves support for a lot of UEFI firmware
and also supports installing on 32-bit UEFI firmware with a 64-bit
kernel.

Note that this does not include support for UEFI Secure Boot.

3.1.2. Automated installation

Some changes mentioned in the previous section also imply changes in
the support in the installer for automated installation using preconfiguration
files. This means that if you have existing preconfiguration files that worked
with the wheezy installer, you cannot expect these to work with the new
installer without modification.

The Installation
Guide has an updated separate appendix with extensive documentation on using
preconfiguration.